1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network computing and the retrieval of documents. Specifically, the present invention relates to the migrating of section-rich Lotus Notes Domino documents to a non-Domino web server.
2. Description of Related Art
Lotus Notes and Domino are client-server based groupware software. Lotus Notes is the client; performing e-mail, calendaring, group scheduling, Web access, and information management. Domino is the integrated messaging and Web application server.
Domino transforms the Notes server into an interactive Web applications server. This server combines the open networking environment of Internet standards and protocols with the powerful application development facilities of Lotus Notes. Domino provides businesses and organizations with the ability to rapidly develop a broad range of business solutions for the Internet and for intranets. The Domino server has made the ability to publish Lotus Notes documents to the Web a dynamic process.
The documents in a Domino database can represent different objects in a business process. For example, the data in these documents may be about customers, employees, products, purchase orders, delivery reports, billing information, or other business objects that are part of a business logic set. In a business workflow, the code can be differentiated between technical infrastructure code—such as accessing a Lotus Notes database, accessing a Lotus Notes document via a view, and accessing the different items in a Lotus Notes document—and the code implementing the business logic—such as accessing all orders delivered to a specific customer during a prior time period.
Lotus Notes/Domino documents have a feature known as sections, which contain additional data that is hidden until expanded. Domino servers can display a document in various states of section expansions. A document with several sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, and the like, can be terse when all sections are collapsed, or extremely verbose when all sections and sub-sections are expanded. Even though the data is from the source of one single document in a Domino database, each of the various states of section expansion in the document are associated with a unique URL.
The architecture of such documents presents several problems to any tool that attempts to mirror this data to a non-Domino web server. First, it can take as many as 2N fetches (where N is the number of sections or various sub-sections) to retrieve each state of the document, because a unique URL references each expansion state. This can literally take hours to mirror documents that contain numerous nested sections. Second, each of these resulting fetches must reside on the mirror document as a unique html document, which can result in well over one hundred times the storage of the original document. Third, whether served by a Domino or non-Domino web server, when serving the mirrored copies of the original document, each time a user clicks on an icon, such as the familiar triangular “twisty” icon, to expand or collapse a section, the request for expansion or collapsing must be handled at the server end, not at the client (browser) end, causing unnecessary client-server traffic.
Bearing in mind the problems and deficiencies of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method to mirror Lotus Notes/Domino documents to a non-Domino web server.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method to reduce the number of fetches when retrieving each state of a Lotus Notes/Domino document being mirrored to a non-Domino web server.
A further object of the invention is to provide a method that allows resulting fetches of a Lotus Notes/Domino document to reside on a mirrored document of a non-Domino web server in a form that does not require a unique html document for each fetch.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a method that allows each request for expansion or collapsing of a section to be handled at the client (browser) end when serving the mirrored copies of the original document.
Still other objects and advantages of the invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.